Editorial:

Veterans Day couldn’t have been more poignant.

Nov. 11 fell this year on Wednesday, six days after a rampage at Ft. Hood, Texas, left a trail of dead and wounded soldiers. Veterans Day came and passed as President Obama still had not made up his mind on dispatching thousands of more troops to Afghanistan.

We’ll return to this point later. First, we pause to thank local veterans throughout the country who have fought in the nation’s wars or worn military fatigues during peacetime. But some veterans stand out even among these old soldiers who sacrificed much for their country.

We’re thinking of Orange County’s own Walter D. Ehlers. On Tuesday, the 88-year-old Medal of Honor recipient from Buena Park visited Mariners Christian School in Costa Mesa. Ehlers’ battlefield heroics in France in the days right after the June 1944 D-Day landings in Normandy earned him the medal, the nation’s highest award for valor in combat shown by an individual member of the Armed Forces. Only 3,448 servicemen have been awarded the medal since the Civil War. Ehlers is one of 94 living medal recipients.

We also salute the men and women serving in the Armed Forces, particularly those who belong to the Marine Corps units adopted by the cities of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa: respectively, the First Battalion, First Marines and the First Battalion, Fifth Marines.

Yet we could not let this Veterans Day pass without remembering the 12 soldiers and one civilian shot dead at Ft. Hood on Nov. 5. It was troubling to learn from news reports that the alleged gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, not only was reported to have harbored zealous religious views bordering on anti-American sentiment, but that this officer was a psychiatrist treating soldiers afflicted with the mental wounds of combat or the stress of pre-deployment.

The shooting occurred soon before Hasan was to serve his first tour in Afghanistan. Which brings us back to the president.

In the summer of 2008, while he was campaigning for the presidency, then-Sen. Obama visited that country, and proclaimed that Afghanistan was where the U.S. should be concentrating its forces in the global fight against Osama bin Laden and his men. When he occupied the Oval Office 10 months ago, Obama was swift to ramp up U.S. force levels in Afghanistan. But he’s taken a lot of time since September weighing an urgent recommendation given to him from his top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal: that the U.S. stands to lose that war unless it deploys as many as 40,000 additional troops.

We’re not necessarily suggesting that the general’s plan is the right way to go. The president has an enormous decision to make. But with the holiday season approaching, we think Obama should have used Veterans Day to level with the men and women in the military about which way he intends to go in Afghanistan.

Candidate Obama was a fiery speaker when he was running for the presidency. As president, however, his public speeches now often come across as detached, scripted and over-polished, as though an army of White House speech writers and spin doctors has vetted and scrubbed them of the originality and spontaneity that made Obama a great orator on the campaign trail. This was evident in his remarks immediately after the Ft. Hood killings and in his speech during the memorial service there, which suffered from a lack of genuine emotion. Obama’s words of comfort were scripted to convey emotion — and he hit all the right points — but his delivery failed to show enough heart given the situation’s gravity.

Perhaps Obama cannot help failing to connect emotionally with the people serving in the Armed Forces because he simply doesn’t know what it’s like being in their shoes. And therein lies the rub. As he ponders a future American course in Afghanistan, Obama’s biggest liability as president is now showing: that he has no experience with having put on a military uniform.

Which leaves us to wonder how John McCain or John Kerry might have juggled the Afghanistan decision and Ft. Hood had either senator been elected president. At the very least, we think, these old warriors would have shown more emotion, if not decisiveness.